Yet what was it exactly the Bush administration had "accomplished" 1 1/2 months into a conflict that would drag on for eight more years -- costing the lives of more than 4,800 coalition troops, mostly Americans, and tens of thousands (some say, hundreds of thousands) of Iraqi civilians? Among the U.S. forces killed were nearly 200 with Ohio ties, including more than 30 from Northeast Ohio.

Admittedly, Iraq under Saddam was a grim dictatorship and killing field for Shiites and Kurds who opposed Saddam's Sunni and Baathist elites.

But it wasn't what the Bush administration erroneously tried to portray in justifying the war -- an extension of al-Qaida's terrorist empire -- until it became so after the March 2003 invasion.

In memoriam

The irony of the Iraq War is what it accomplished for al-Qaida and its terrorist offshoots while harming fundamental U.S. interests, even beyond the lost treasure in human life, limbs and psyches, and the trillions of taxpayer dollars that it consumed.

The war gave Osama bin Laden what he otherwise couldn't have achieved -- radicalizing young Muslims, creating new terrorist offshoots and new techniques of urban terrorism, and making the U.S. "war on terror" appear to be a war on Islam.

The Iraq detour may even have saved bin Laden's skin, for a while, when U.S. military and intelligence assets were abruptly diverted just as troops were closing in on his terrorist hideout in the rugged Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan.

In his 2004 memoir, "American Soldier," Gen. Tommy Franks, then commanding U.S. forces, recalls getting "an unexpected call" the morning of Nov. 27, 2001, as he and his operations staff worked "on air support for Afghan units pushing into the Spin Mountains around Tora Bora."

The caller was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"General Franks, the President wants us to look at options for Iraq," Franks quotes Rumsfeld.

In the conversation, Rumsfeld presses Franks to "dust off" the current war plan "and get back to me next week."

Franks then describes spending the next four weeks repeatedly briefing Rumsfeld and painstakingly revising the Iraq War plans multiple times.

In other words, during the most crucial phase of the Tora Bora battle, when bin Laden and his closest advisers -- the brain trust of the 9/11 attack -- escaped capture, the top U.S. military commander and his team were distracted by Iraq War planning on the orders of the White House and Pentagon.

Furthermore, many months before U.S. officials broached publicly the idea of war in Iraq, war planning was already at fever pitch.

In fact, the evidence suggests there was never the searching, internal policy debate that should have attended a decision to plan for war -- or the ultimate decision to go to war.

As Sir Richard Dearlove, or "C," the head of Britain's spy agency MI6, later told top British officials after his July 2002 visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., as recorded in a leaked Downing Street memo, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

But in the meantime, the Iraq War laid the foundation for the spreading violence and sectarian strife -- first in Iraq, then Pakistan and now Syria -- that create the milieu in which terrorists and extremists thrive.

It also elevated the fortunes of the world's biggest terrorist-sponsoring state, Iran, by eliminating the Iraq counterweight and by giving Iran unprecedented influence within the new, Shiite-dominated Iraq.

The most damaging 16 presidential words uttered before the war were not Bush's infamous 2003 State of the Union distortion about Saddam seeking uranium from Africa. Rather, they were his statement a year earlier that, "States like these [North Korea, Iran and Iraq] . . . constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

The axis-of-evil declaration marked a turning point in U.S. foreign policy -- with the Iraq War intended to signal to others, including Iran and North Korea, that diplomacy, sanctions and a diplomatic waiting game were out the window, and the muscle of pre-emptive war was in.

No longer would America engage in traditional forms of statecraft to deter dictators -- or even hold its nose to make book with them, as Rumsfeld himself did when he had tea with Saddam in 1983, at a time when U.S. officials knew Saddam's troops were routinely using chemical weapons against Iranians, but looked the other way because they didn't want Iran to win the Iran-Iraq war.

Yet, invading Iraq to oust Saddam made the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction more valuable to dictators, as a deterrent to such "pre-emptive" attacks.

North Korea is the best example of this. At the time of Bush's Jan. 29, 2002, "axis of evil" speech, Pyongyang's plutonium-production program was under international nuclear safeguards and inspections, although U.S. officials suspected that North Korea had a secret uranium-enrichment program hidden from inspectors. Pyongyang also had agreed to consider talks on a missile treaty.

Broad consultation. War can have fateful, unanticipated consequences. Small cabals of policymakers should not be calling the shots.

Question everything. Many in the U.S. Congress, the media and public were too ready to buy the Bush administration's dire stories about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, even though the evidence was skimpy and sometimes recycled or directly contradicted by other sources.

The aftermath matters. In all the meticulous Bush administration back and forth about how to present intelligence findings to support the war, little attention was given to what might go wrong after Saddam's ouster.

Beware emigres bearing convenient intelligence. U.S. war planners and intelligence operators were snookered by Shiite dandy Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, whose interference and mistaken advice also infected the U.S. occupation and helped stir the flames of Sunni insurgency. This lesson bears remembering with regard to Syria's future.

And the most important lesson: Do not take the nation to war for hidden ideological or personal reasons. For some Bush administration officials, Saddam's overthrow was unfinished business from the 1991 Gulf War, making it irresistibly tempting to throw the dictator into the post-9/11 pot and stir. That compromised the U.S. "war on terror" and distorted the political aftermath in ways that remain underappreciated in Washington -- and therefore uncorrected.

Ten years on, it's past time for a realistic reassessment about this misbegotten war.

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